Exmoor has long featured in the history of agricultural development in England because of C. S. Orwin’sOrwin, C. S. pioneering history in 1929. In the last two decades, historians have noticed the emotive language and concepts used by contemporaries to describe and justify domestic reclamation and enclosure projects and have argued that these drew explicitly on ideas of colonisation. Recently, Carl Griffin has extended this ‘domestic colonisation’ narrative to the English enclosure movement, including Exmoor, but existing studies have said much less about how such ideas were put into practice, and with what effects. Rethinking reclamation on Exmoor is timely because recent projects on the landscape archaeology of ‘improvement’, and rapidly developing palaeoecological sampling techniques have expanded our knowledge of the chronology and effects of landscape change. In addition, in 2017, important documents from the Knight estate archive were rediscovered, which enabled a new research project to be undertaken on Exmoor’s reclamation.